UMG Developer (6/28/2010)Also, if the identity increment was -1, then both option 1 and 3 would be correct, as there is no clustered index to order it, and no ORDER BY statement specified, so either -1, -2, -3 or -3, -2, -1 could be the result.

+1

Without explicit ORDER BY, there is no way we can predict the order. We could get any permutation, such as 1-,-3,-2 or -2,-1,-3 and so on.